ruralrocker2010
My problem is what Jim said. It's CONSTANT, CONSTANT workarounds and interruptions. Nothing just works and then I spend 80% of my time trying to chase a rabbit instead of writing & recording my ideas.
So, I think I got a little lost in the translation - I can use studiocat for my custom machine, or that would be risky? Just need some clarity. Thanks!
Well, throwing hardware at the problem is a good solution :). In general if you have a high end computer, and you do get something customized such that it is good for audio, you can get to the point where you can just do whatever you want and not care because it'll probably work well. Not the case 100% of the time, sometimes software is crap and causes problems and there's nothing that can be done since it is just written poorly.
Studiocat is a good option if you want a custom machine that you didn't build. What they do is buy the same parts you could buy, but put it together, configure it, test it, and support it. So it is a situation if you want support like you get from a major vendor, but control over the parts.
Regardless of if you build or buy, there are a number of things to try and get to keep your problems down:
1) More processor power is more better. While in general the CPU isn't going to be the limiting factor, it can be sometimes and the more you have the less likely it'll stall out on anything. Stick with Intel and with their high end stuff.
2) Throw a good amount of RAM at the problem. At least 16GB, maybe 32GB. You want your system to not have to page stuff out so you want plenty to load all your programs n' samples n' background services and so on.
3) SSDs are amazing. If you can afford it, SSDs are what you want for your samples storage. They are so fast that you'll basically never have a dropout due to waiting on disk access, even under heavy sample loads. The Samsung 850 EVOs are great choices for that for not too much money. I like a SSD for your OS, and another for samples. The audio tracks can go on a magnetic drive.
4) You can make some OS and UEFI changes to power management to help with latency. Basically you turn off most of the power saving features. You disable C-States, turbo mode, and dynamic voltage for the CPU. You fix it at one frequency and one voltage level. For the GPU, you change it from adaptive mode to max performance, which does the same thing and disables power management. This can double the idle wattage of your system, but helps with latency as there isn't any waiting for these things to spool up and down. This is the stuff that you need a custom system/motherboard for in general. Dell and such don't let you change that in their UEFI, whereas motherboard vendors like ASUS do.
5) If you run a virus scanner, make sure you run a good one. I recommend NOD32 from ESET. Also change it so that it does not do scanning on the directories with your samples and audio files in them, and that you exclude scanning of extensions of audio files types (WAV, CWP, NKI, NKM, that kind of thing) so it doesn't mess with that stuff while you are working.
6) Use wired network, not wireless. While all networking causes more latency when accessed than you might think, wireless is a lot worse. Also using a good NIC from Intel generally seems to give the best results. You can disable the NIC, of course, but I find it unnecessary.
7) Don't run unnecessary background processes. That doesn't mean go all slash n' burn, you can still have stuff running, but if you don't need it, don't have it run all the time.
If you do all that you will probably have a system that just works and you can do what you want. I never bounce anything, I run all the samplers, all the effects live on my system and it isn't an issue. No dropouts, slowdowns, stutters, etc. Nothing magic, just high end hardware :)